Marco Odermatt secures overall and giant slalom Crystal Globes with third consecutive Alpine skiing World Cup win
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Updated 12/03/2023 at 12:55 GMT
A high quality second giant slalom in Kranjska Gora was won by Marco Odermatt as he dug deep to beat Henrik Kristoffersen and Alexis Pinturault. Odermatt’s win means he now officially has an unassailable lead in both the overall and giant slalom standings, so he has wrapped up both Crystal Globes. He will now head to the World Cup finals on Wednesday in a bid to finish of the season in style.
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Marco Odermatt secured the overall and giant slalom titles with a third consecutive win as he did the double in Kranjska Gora, beating Henrik Kristoffersen and Alexis Pinturault.
Odermatt was all-but confirmed as the overall champion when Aleksander Aamodt Kilde opted to miss this weekend’s races and the Swiss star is now mathematically uncatchable.
Kristoffersen had an exceptional second run, but it wasn’t enough to stop Odermatt from winning his sixth giant slalom race of the season, and with it, the giant slalom Crystal Globe.
“It’s crazy,” said Odermatt. “It was another hard battle in the second run.
“I made my mistakes just before the flat, so I thought it was going to be tight. I really risked it all and it worked out.
“There’s a big team behind me, with all of the coaches and everybody who helps me. They do an incredible job. Without them, none of this would be possible.”
Despite Slovakian coach Epstein Poul setting a difficult course that featured a lot of swing, Odermatt was still fastest in the first run as he nailed the final dozen gates.
Pinturault was only 0.28 seconds behind and Kristoffersen still had chance of the win at 0.47 seconds off the pace.
Thomas Tumler set the early benchmark time in the second run with a combined time of 2:25.04, before being bumped down by a superb run from Belgium’s Sam Maes.
Loic Meillard had a disappointing first run but his second effort moved him up from 18th to 11th, by the end of the afternoon, as he lowered the new target time to 2:24.11.
Rasmus Windingstad went to the top by 0.16 seconds with 11 athletes to go, then Filip Zubcic and Marco Schwarz both had short spells in first place.
Filippo Della Vite’s impressive rise continued as he risked it all to snatch the lead away from Schwarz, with just 0.06 seconds separating the pair.
Zan Kranjec somewhat made up for his underwhelming result on Saturday with a clean second run which put him 0.21 seconds ahead of Della Vite on home soil to get the crowd on their feet.
Lucas Braathen missed out on beating Kranjec by 0.01 of a second, then came the top three from the first leg.
Kristoffersen had a stormer with the fastest run of the afternoon to take the lead with a huge advantage of 1.30 seconds which put the pressure on Pinturault and Odermatt.
Pinturault was also on a flyer as he was 0.23 ahead at the penultimate sector time, but lost it at the end to be 0.38 adrift of Kristoffersen.
It looked like Odermatt threw it all away when he made some big mistakes at the top of the course and lost nearly all of his lead, only for the giant slalom world champion to blitz the second half of the run to win for a 13th time this season.
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